Dr. Santangelo is Director of Statistical Genetics and Genetic Epidemiology in the Psychiatric and Neurodevelopmental Genetics Unit, under the Center for Human Genetic Research, MGH. She is also Associate Director of the Training Program in Psychiatric Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Harvard School of Public Health, where she has been a faculty member since 1994. Dr. Santangelo is Assistant Professor at both the Harvard Medical School (Psychiatry), and the Harvard School of Public Health (Epidemiology).
A genetic epidemiologist, educated at Wellesley College and the Harvard School of Public Health, Dr. Santangelo’s graduate training was supervised by Drs. Ming Tsuang, David Pauls, and Neil Risch. Formerly at New England Medical Center and Tufts School of Medicine, she joined the PNGU at MGH in 2002. Her work involves determining the genetic architecture underlying various psychiatric disorders and other disorders with complex inheritance. Dr. Santangelo has studied Tourette's syndrome and obsessive compulsive disorder, autism, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, attention deficit disorder, smoking and nicotine addiction, and age-related macular degeneration using techniques such as parametric ('model-dependent') and non-parametric ('model-free') linkage analysis, case-control and family based association studies, heritability estimation, quantitative trait linkage analysis, and endophenotype measurement and analysis.
Dr. Santangelo was the recipient of a Career Development Award from the National Institute of Mental Health (K21 MH01338) and has received grants from The Medical Foundation, the March of Dimes Foundation and the NLM Family Foundation to study autism. Currently, she is the PI of a Family Study of Autism at MGH, as well as co-PI of a candidate gene study of autism, with Dr. Vijaya Ramesh, also of the CHGR. She is the PI of an R01 grant from the NIMH to study endophenotypes associated with schizophrenia in a genetic isolate in Nepal, and the PI of a pilot candidate gene study of smoking phenotypes which is part of a Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center based at Brown University. |
